very nearly to the Walpurgis of a fever.  It is not the mere noise—­other noises won’t do it.  The air, to be sure, is thin, and blood-vessels expand, and perhaps the brain is pressed upon unduly.  Well, I don’t know.  Material laws may possibly account for it.  I can only speak with certainty of the phenomenon.  I’ve experienced it; and some among those of my friends who have reached that serene period of life in which we con over our ailments, register our sensations, and place ourselves upon regimens, tell me the same story of themselves.  And this, too, I know, that upon the night in question, Mr. Paul Dangerfield, who was not troubled either with vapours or superstitions, as he lay in his green-curtained bed in the Brass Castle, had as many dreams flitting over his brain and voices humming and buzzing in his ears, as if he had been a poet or a pythoness.

He had not become, like poor Sturk before his catastrophe, a dreamer of dreams habitually.  I suppose he did dream.  The beasts do.  But his visions never troubled him; and I don’t think there was one morning in a year on which he could have remembered his last night’s dream at the breakfast-table.

On this particular night, however, he did dream. Vidit somnium.  He thought that Sturk was dead, and laid out in a sort of state in an open coffin, with a great bouquet on his breast, something in the continental fashion, as he remembered it in the case of a great, stern, burly ecclesiastic in Florence.  The coffin stood on tressels in the aisle of Chapelizod church; and, of all persons in the world, he and Charles Nutter stood side by side as chief mourners, each with a great waxen taper burning in one hand, and a white pocket-handkerchief in the other.

Now in dreams it sometimes happens that men undergo sensations of awe, and even horror, such as waking they never know, and which the scenery and situation of the dream itself appear wholly inadequate to produce.  Mr. Paul Dangerfield, had he been called on to do it, would have kept solitary watch in a dead man’s chamber, and smoked his pipe as serenely as he would in the club-room of the Phoenix.  But here it was different.  The company were all hooded and silent, sitting in rows:  and there was a dismal sound of distant waters, and an indefinable darkness and horror in the air; and, on a sudden, up sat the corpse of Sturk, and thundered, with a shriek, a dreadful denunciation, and Dangerfield started up in his bed aghast, and cried—­’Charles Archer!’

The storm was bellowing and shrieking outside, and for some time that grim, white gentleman, bolt upright in his shirt, did not know distinctly in what part of the world, or, indeed, in what world he was.